BETWEEN FRAMES — A CULTURAL CENTER FOR THE SEVENTH ART

Beyond screening films, the Cultural Center is conceived as a place for encounter, education, production, and cultural exchange.

Theaters coexist with public and cultural programs, transforming cinema from an isolated interior experience into part of the everyday life of the community.

The spaces between the programmed rooms become equally important: courtyards, gardens, shaded passages, terraces, and gathering areas extend cultural activity beyond the screen.

The project ultimately asks how architecture can give physical form to the collective experience of storytelling.

The proposal extends beyond the limits of the existing building, seeking to integrate the Cultural Center for the Seventh Art with the surrounding urban space and with two complementary cultural projects developed collaboratively by two other designers.

Rather than treating each institution as an isolated object, the three proposals are conceived as parts of a shared cultural network.

Adjacent to Cine Morelos, the proposed Museum of Audio helps define a new public plaza between the cultural buildings. This open space becomes an extension of the cinema itself, accommodating outdoor screenings, events, gatherings, and cultural activities.

In the opposite direction, the project establishes a connection with Casona Spencer through a sequence of intermediate buildings and public spaces. These elements create a gradual transition between the different institutions, extending cultural activity into the surrounding urban fabric. The result is a continuous cultural link in which architecture and public space operate together:

Cinema Center → Public Plaza → Museum of Audio → Cultural Link → Casona Spencer 

The project therefore shifts from the scale of the individual building to the scale of the city. Cinema, sound, heritage, public space, and cultural activity become interconnected components of a larger urban experience.

 Culture moves beyond the walls of the institution, becoming the connective tissue between architecture, public space, and the city.

Rather than understanding cinema exclusively through the screening room, the project the project brings together the different dimensions of the Seventh Art within a single architectural experience.

The foyer becomes the central point of arrival and distribution, connecting visitors with a café, cinema museum, video library, shop, auditorium, three screening rooms, event space, and administrative offices.

Each program represents a different relationship with cinema. The museum and video library preserve and communicate its history, while the cinemas and auditorium provide spaces for projection, presentation, and dialogue. The event room expands the building toward festivals, exhibitions, lectures, and cultural gatherings, while the café and shop extend the experience into everyday social life.

Together, these spaces transform the center from a destination for watching films into a place for discovering, discussing, preserving, and celebrating cinema.

The architecture is conceived as a sequence of experiences, using movement, framing, transition, light, and shadow as instruments of spatial composition—principles shared by both architecture and film.

Foyer → Encounter
Museum → Memory
Video Library → Knowledge
Cinema → Experience
Auditorium → Dialogue
Events → Collective Life

Cinema frames stories. Architecture creates the space in which those stories become collective memory.

The proposal does not seek to erase the memory of the former cinema and the collective life it once held for more than 500 people, but to allow that memory to continue through use. By introducing a diverse cultural program and a self-sustaining economic model, the project transforms preservation into continuity—creating a place capable of evolving, supporting itself beyond governmental funding, and remaining active through multiple forms of cultural and public life.

 To preserve a place is not to freeze its memory, but to give it the means to remain alive.

Like A New Assembly, this project belongs to an earlier stage in the architectural exploration of the practice, preceding the study of Classical and Neoclassical Architecture, traditional construction, and Traditional Urbanism that would later reshape our approach to intervention within existing buildings.

The original proposal reflects a contemporary architectural position, intentionally establishing a distinction between the existing structure and the new intervention.

Our subsequent studies have led us to reconsider this relationship.

We have come to understand preservation not simply as maintaining the existing building while introducing a contrasting new architecture, but as a deeper process of understanding its proportions, materials, construction methods, architectural language, and underlying order. Contemporary systems introduced without this understanding can become physically, materially, or architecturally incompatible with historic structures.

For this reason, we hope to revisit the project and explore how the same programmatic and social ambitions could be developed through a more Classical and contextually continuous architectural approach—one in which the new intervention emerges from the logic of the existing building rather than being imposed upon it.

The program remains relevant. The commitment to cultural life remains. What has evolved is our understanding of how architecture should respond to what is already there.

To revisit a project is not to reject its past, but to return to it with greater knowledge, deeper respect, and a more mature understanding of continuity.